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Of Impeachment and Accountability
Never Trump Republicans and their Democratic co-conspirators have another trick up their sleeves. Knowing that they probably do not have the votes to convict and remove the President in the Senate, they are desperately searching for a way to pull it off and they think they’ve found it: A secret vote and/or a generous reading of the two-thirds rule.
Pushed by people like lobbyist Juleanna Glover (formerly of the Bush 43 Administration and Bill Kristol acolyte), Laurence Tribe and former Sen. Jeff Flake, the operating theory is that if Senators were freed from accountability to their voters there would be 30 to 35 Republicans in the Senate ready to vote “yes” on conviction.
The other pipe dream is that the Constitution only demands a two-thirds majority of the Senators present. For every Senator that refuses to attend it brings that two-thirds number lower. But staying away is the same as a yes vote.
Jim Geraghty points out at National Review, “If Trump really is an unconstitutional menace who is abusing the power of the presidency for his personal interests, stopping him ought to be worth losing a Senate seat. And if this action isn’t worth losing a Senate seat over, then it’s hard to see how it is worth removing a president.”
A secret ballot after secret proceedings in the House sounds like a recipe for disaster. How do you think the public would react?
Published in Politics
i just got home from the excellent Richard Jewell film. I am going to bed.
Evidence. Proof. Not just wild words.
You are saying that DJT is unique in things he said. I claim that HRC is unique in her malfeasance, and therefore DJT’s statements shouldn’t be compared to any other candidate’s.
Thomas Jefferson–Aaron Burr
And, yes, they were rivals.
Hillary is unique in what she has done, Gary.
Or I guess you think She has never broken the law.
Sad.
Bwhaha
@garyrobbins knows better then Andrew McCarthy. Wow. We are so honored to have such an august presence among us. Because what does a former US assistant DA know about this stuff compared to a family law attorney from AZ.
Gary, your argument was that former presidents respected each other, now it is current presidents do not call for prosecution of their political rivals, who commit crimes? Which is it? It’s easy to pretend you win every argument when you can change the rules on the fly.
Touché!
HRC is not unique. Trump’s reaction is.
Yes. And that was in 1800? 219 years ago? In that Burr was also an overt traitor, he was worse than Trump.
I think that Hillary was unusually venal, and enriched herself with speaker’s fees for herself and her husband. Hillary and Trump are two peas in a pod. Thank goodness I didn’t vote for either of them.
Both. Especially the latter.
A “rival” is not necessarily a former president, and is not in the case you are referring to. I sometimes refer to Hillary as a former president, but technically she’s not. Why are you changing the goal posts? And if a rival is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. If Democrats are going to nominate obvious criminals, I’m not going to favor a candidate who just ignores the crime.
Gary, do you want all Republican presidents (and candidates) to just maintain the status quo? In some cases that might be the best choice, but to always do it is not the way to lead.
Gary, are you really saying that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s actions over the course of her career were the norm for presidents/presidential candidates? That sounds like you’re really disparaging the judgement of the American public over the past 231 years of elected constitutional government.
To me, Hillary was simply a nominee who never gets within 100 miles of the nomination if she doesn’t have XX chromosomes and is the wife of a former two-term president. If the Democrats weren’t looking for a ‘historic first’ female candidate that they thought women would mindlessly go to the polls to vote for, and if she wasn’t propped up by her husband’s own highly-questionable financial funding network which she bought into 100 percent, there’s zero appeal to her as a candidate, and her flaws and blatant violations of federal law (wonder what Gen. Patraeus thought of Comey giving Hillary a free pass over having classified documents on a non-secured device?) allowed her to skate the law in a way no other presidential candidate at least in the modern era has tried to get away with.
If believing all presidential nominees had the character and morality of HRC, then Howard Zinn would qualify as a “Country First” Republican.
This is what I don’t comprehend about your logic…
Hillary is a crook. She and Bill took massive amounts of money from foreign governments while she was at the State Depertment. She ran an off-the-books, unsecured home brew server in her house and placed classified documents on it, she knowingly shared these documents with an aide on more unsecured hardware. And she destroyed evidence.
Yet, in your world, Trump is not allowed to point that out. To call her what she is – that’s unseemly, it’s out of bounds, it’s against the proprieties. Yet she was allowed to say whatever she damned well pleased about him and his supporters. This double standard is exactly why there’s a President Trump to begin with. I don’t know about the rest of the country but you deserve a second Trump Administration.
She did more than say. She invented a whole conspiracy theory about the President and Russia and got all her goons in the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ to spy and to prosecute.
But this is apparently okay because “Trump is a unique threat” or something.
Hillary and her goons so brainwashed the American citizen that Gary still believes in Russia collusion and Robert Mueller and fantasizes about the President dying a broken man.
Trump has the worst aspects of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy in terms of vilifying his enemies.
I can’t think of any leader of any American party who has exhibited such control over his own party and has crushed internal dissent to such a level. Can you? Maybe FDR who was furious with the Senators who stopped him from packing the Supreme Court. And Dixiecrats, as a group, who crushed the civil rights of African-Americans. And big city machine politics. But that’s it.
Burr was never prosecuted for treason? Jefferson never called for the prosecution of Burr for treason? What history fairy tales do you read?
You really are clueless.
Has there ever been a Republican president who had less control over his own party and less control over internal dissent?
I said in another thread that I wished he had 10 kids – who else can he trust.
There were many (Rs and Ds) who were gunning for him the second he got elected. They’ve tried to trip him and trap him at every move.
I’m amazed and grateful he’s still standing
You just wanted her to be President more than you wanted Trump to be President. Binary outcome.
More to the point, all of that is not worth going after, but now, Trump Jr. Meeting someone to get dirt on Hillary, that is a bridge too far.
Heck, McMuffin did not pay his staff and I think that is who Gary voted for. Heh.
May I suggest a position with the Arizona Cardinals’ grounds crew in the event you want to pick up some extra income?
You are most skilled at moving the goalposts.
Your claim about “prosecuting rivals” is (once again) Fact Check: False.
Please acknowledge.
You are right. Over 210 years ago, Jefferson called for Burr’s prosecution. Do.you have any other examples in, say, the last 200 years?
You might look into the whole Cleveland-Garfield-Arthur-Cleveland episode. Arthur was made the VP candidate because Cleveland had called him corrupt.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but in several states, including Arizona, the Republican Party has done away with primary elections for President.
I heard on Axios, that Trump has completely taken over the state party apparatus in some 42 states.
Nationally, the RNC and Trump campaign have merged. If memory serves, even in 1972, Nixon did not merge CRP (The Committee to Re-elect the President) and the RNC.
Hillary was a particularly flawed person. However, encouraging chants of “Lock Her Up” is uniquely Un-American.
I did not know that Howard Zinn was a Registered Republican. I am.